What’s that? Your job is less engaging than you’d hoped? You’re not sure you can make it to lunch without going insane? Well, you’re in luck. Take a break and read my new short story, The Last Hard Man in Tribeca. It’s live in the new issue of Pinball this morning!
Are you curious about my new novel? Do you want to see what the cover looks like? Read the first few pages? Well, today’s your lucky day, because you can do all of that and help me out at the same time.
I’ve entered The Prophet of Marathon into the Kindle Scout program, and my campaign went live this morning. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Kindle Scout, Amazon describes it as “a place where readers help decide if a book gets published.” For each book that’s entered, they post the cover, a short description, and an excerpt from the manuscript, and they invite readers to nominate the books that they would like to see published.
At the end of the thirty-day campaign, they give you a decision one way or another. Amazon never spells out, precisely, their selection criteria. Clearly, the amount of traffic that the book generates plays a role, but it appears that just getting the most nominations doesn’t guarantee you a publishing contract. My guess is that you need to attract enough interest to get the editors’ attention, and then you’ll at least have a shot.
I would love nothing more than to see what Amazon’s marketing muscle could do with this book, so I’m giving it a try.
You can nominate me here.
If you like what you see, tell a friend (or, more optimally, all your friends). Many thanks!
Tacked to the wall of my office, just above the spot on my desk where the telephone sits, I keep a copy of William Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. If you’ve never read it, or if you haven’t read it lately, take a minute and Google it. In five short paragraphs, he manages to say more than I could in 50,000 words.
Faulkner gave his speech to a world that was still bleeding from the wounds of the Second World War, at a time when nuclear annihilation seemed not just likely, but imminent. Humanity had reached a point where the only relevant question seemed to be, in Faulkner’s words, “When will I be blown up?”
Thankfully, we’ve backed away from that particular precipice. I haven’t lost a lot of sleep worrying about a nuclear strike from our former Cold War adversaries. But, as I look out my window, across West Street and down onto the two memorial fountains that mark the mass grave in my neighborhood, I know that mankind’s worst self-destructive tendencies are still very much alive in the 21st Century.
Today is a day for remembering an act of almost incomprehensible evil. But, for me at least, it’s also a day to affirm my faith in humanity, not by trying to forget the evil, or pretending that we’ll never see its like again, but by staring it in the face and declaring that it will never overcome us. As will always be the case, Faulkner said it better than I could:
“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
Good news – my short story, Short-Changed, is now live in Issue 3, Volume 2 of Mulberry Fork Review. You can check it out here.
Let me know what you think of it!
OK… probably not all the much, really. But, as of December, I’ll be able to say that we’ve both been published by The Satuday Evening Post. They just bought my short story, Undocumented, to use on their website as part of their New Fiction Friday series! I’m very excited about it. The only bad news is that it’s not scheduled to appear until December 18 (it has a bit of a Christmas theme, so fair enough), so the world is gonna have to wait until then to read it. I will, of course, remind the world when the time comes.
… although you wouldn’t know it if you looked at my blog. Pretty shameful stuff on my end, not having posted anything here since September. I guess that’s part of the challenge of being a part time author – it’s easy to let things slide, and before you know it, you’ve gone three months without updating your website…
The good news is that, even though I haven’t been posting, I have been writing. I finished the first draft of my second novel back in October, but then I decided to re-write the ending completely (among other edits), so I just finished a second draft today. I’m going to have Erinn and a couple of others give it a read and then we’ll see where we’re at, but I think it’s pretty close. I think I’m going to call it The Prophet of Marathon. More to come on this (hopefully) soon!
Also, earlier this fall, I finished a short story called Short-Changed. I’ve submitted it to a handful of journals and magazines, so we’ll see if it goes anywhere. One way or the other, I’ll get it out there.
As for Peripheral Involvement, the ranking boost fuled by my early September discount/promotions has faded. Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose. I am happy to report, though, that the book has continued to sell, albeit in modest numbers.
I plan to do a better job posting here, so look for more updates soon!
If you recall, some months ago, I said that I hoped to finish the first draft of my second novel by the end of the summer. Since I turned on my TV last night and saw a college football game, it seems like that time has come (although, in our house, summer won’t officially end until the kids go back to school next Thursday). At any rate, I didn’t quite meet my goal – I’m up to about 85,000 words and the end is in sight, but more work needs to be done. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Meanwhile, in celebration of fall’s arrival, I’m putting Peripheral Involvement on sale. For the next two weeks, you can get the e-book version for just $0.99. That price will apply across all platforms – Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Google, Smashwords – wherever you can find the e-book, it’ll be $0.99. If you’ve already read it (many thanks for that, by the way), this is the perfect time to recommend it to a friend.
Enjoy your Labor Day weekend!
Summer is just flying by, isn’t it? I can’t believe it’s August already! July was packed full of family fun, and there’s more on the way! In between, though, I’ve tried to buckle down and push myself to finish the first draft of book number two. I’m up to 80,000 words, and I think the end is in sight! Of course, getting through the first draft will only represent the end of the beginning, but it’ll still be a big step.
Last week, Peripheral Involvement received a wonderful review from Richard Bunning. You can see it here (scroll down to the bottom of this page – it’s #15 on this list), or you can also see it on my Amazon, Goodreads, or Barnes & Noble listings. Many thanks, Richard! I’m so glad that you enjoyed it!
As a result of Richard’s review, Peripheral Involvement has been awarded a place on the Awesome Indies list of quality independent fiction. So I’ve got that goin’ for me. Which is nice. You can check out their site here.
I also posted an interview on Awesomegang.com (not related to Awesome Indies – just happened to do two “awesome” things at around the same time).
Hope everyone is enjoying their summer!
Fair warning: this post contains some discussion about the personality of the main character of Peripheral Involvement. There’s nothing here that I would describe as a spoiler, plot-wise, but if you haven’t read the book, and if you’re the type of person that likes to read things with a totally clean slate, then maybe stop here (and go read the book)! For everyone else, please continue…
The title of this post is a quote from one of my all-time favorite works, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. I’ve been thinking about it lately, since a reviewer remarked on the fact he didn’t find the main character in Peripheral Involvement to be very likeable. I didn’t perceive his comments on Jack’s (lack of) likeability as a criticism, but it got me pondering the question of how much an author should care about readers liking his or her protagonist.
Dostoevsky didn’t seem to trouble himself much on that front. The nameless narrator of Notes from Underground is about as far from amiable as one can get (in the first two sentences of the story, he descibes himself as “sick,” “spiteful” and “unattractve,” and he gets less sympathetic from there). Underground Man is probably not the guy that you want to take on a road trip to Vegas, but for my money he’s one of the most interesting characters I’ve ever run across in literature.
Of course, writers of the stature and talent of Dostoevsky tend to be able to pull things off that might be difficult for writers like, say, me. During the writing and editing process, I worried a fair bit about how my readers would react to Jack. I always understood that he wasn’t going to come across as a particularly likeable guy. You can fairly describe him as self-centered, arrogant, lazy, entitled and at least a little misogynistic. He smokes constantly, drinks heavily and abuses an array of illegal drugs. And those are just the shortcomings that come to mind off the top of my head.
A fair number of Peripheral Involvement’s 282 pages are spent inside Jack’s head. I was afraid that if people found him truly reprehensible, they might have lost interest in his story. On top of that, I was a little apprehensive about the fact that so many of Jack’s experiences were taken from my own life. If people recognized chunks of me in the character, would they attribute all of those negative traits to me as well? After all, my mother was going to read this thing…
I thought about trying to smooth some of Jack’s edges, and I played with a few additional scenes here and there that would have shown off some of his more redeeming characteristics. In the end, I scrapped most of those edits. I don’t regret it, because I think what’s left are the elements of Jack’s character that I wanted to explore, and that fit with the story. But I am curious to see what you think. Did you dislike Jack? Does it depend on whether you know me personally? I’d love to hear some thoughts on this!
Whenever I’ve approached anyone and tried to get them interested in my novel, they’ve almost always asked about genre. Literary agents want to see it in query letters, writing competitions demand that you specify it on your entry form, and readers use it as a tool to help them choose amongst the millions of books on offer.
That makes a certain amount of sense, of course. Whenever you’re trying to get someone to spend time with a book (or a movie, or a TV show, or anything else, really), it’s only fair to give them some idea of what they’re getting into. A reader that demands vampires or werewolves should know up front that Peripheral Involvement might not fulfill their requirements.
For some books, genre classification seems pretty straightforward. If characters zip around the galaxy at something close to the speed of light, I’m guessing that you’re writing science fiction. The presence of wizards and witches betokens fantasy. The man with the Stetson on his head and the Colt on his hip is always a relaible indicator of a Western.
I never felt like Peripheral Involvement had an obvious genre. It’s pretty easy to list the things that it’s not. It’s decidely not fantasy, romance, horror or science fiction. It’s not at all for teens or young adults. It gets a bit trickier, though, when I try to define exactly what it is. A mystery? Well, there is certainly a big element of that in the story, but I’ve always hesitated to bill it as such, or at least primarily as such. Annointing a novel as a “mystery” creates the expectation that everything will be solved in the end, but one of the things that I was trying to explore in this book was the reality that we often have to live without satisfactory explanations, or affirmations that we made the right choices. There is a resolution in the end, but there is no Sherlock Holmes-like character that puts all of the pieces together.
How about suspense/thriller? Again, there’s a lot of that here as well: the possibility of a high-reaching conspiracy, life and death consequences… but there’s also a strong focus on the main character’s perception of himself, and the world around him, that I wouldn’t want to minimize by appealing solely to readers’ thirst for adrenaline.
That kind of stuff suggests literary fiction, but that label always makes me squirm a bit. When I hear it, I always picture myself in a high-school English class trying to unpack the symbolism in Moby Dick, or something along those lines. That’s definitely not the kind of thing I was going for here. Besides, it seems redundant to call a novel “literary,” doesn’t it? Aren’t they all?
In the end, when pressed, I tell people that Peripheral Involvement is a realistic-literary-mystery-suspense-conspiracy-thriller. But all I really hope is that they find it to be an engagaing story about an interesting character.